The Talao team is excited to announce the alpha release of our open decentralised protocol to manage Talent Certified Reputation. The set of smart contracts of the Professional Reputation Vault Protocol has been deployed on the Ethereum Mainet. It is available for DApps evaluation on GitHub. Contributors and developers can contact our team for more information or to contribute.

The Reputation Vault Protocol is the first decentralized protocol, fully open source, built on blockchain that allows Talent to have full ownership of their professional data. The fuel of this protocol is the TALAO token. The Reputation Vault Protocol is based on Blockcerts certificates.

Agreements with Freelancing Marketplaces have already been signed to use the protocol with more than one hundred thousands Talents.

Hi guys, lead developer of Talao here. We developed a React.js component to display and verify a BlockCerts certificate. It’s still work in progress and has a lot of room for improvement, but it’s working and available.

Yes, among other documents, Talents can add BlockCerts into their Vault. Our Fully Certified Resume standard (FCR) fetches some data from custom fields stored in those BlockCerts (or other types of certificates we could add).

TLTR

Since we got questions through private channels, Thierry and me would like to bring some further explanation about Talao with Blockcerts.

At the moment, Talao does not have any partnership / joint project with MIT, Blockcerts or Learningmachine. Thank you guys, for the awesome work you’ve done and for releasing it!!!

At Talao, we are fully building stuff on the Blockcerts standard as an essential brick of our suite. We are currently using Blockcerts’ tool (https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer) to sign certificates that fit Talao’s business. We built and are still extending our own not-released tools to generate our custom Blockcerts compliant unsigned certificates. We did create, are building, releasing and maintaining in opensource our own tool to display and verify Blockcerts certificates (https://github.com/guix77/react-blockcerts). We certainly love very much the Blockcerts mobile app and hope that when we finally get to production, an update would have been pushed to the mobile stores to allow verification of certificates issued on Ethereum.

In one sentence: we create certificates with our not-released tool, we sign them with Cert-issuer, we display and verify them with our opensource released react-blockcerts, we use the Blockcerts mobile app and we have solid soon upcoming stuff.

Busy people: you can stop reading. Now details!

Certificates creation React app

We built a very simple React app that currently generates all the (unsigned) certificates that you can see on Talao if you are one of our testers or on https://guix77.github.io/react-blockcerts/ for everybody. Data is stored in the web browser local storage. It mimics a workflow from the Recipient to the Issuer (it could be changed and factorized into a general interest workflow, for now it’s customized for Talao’s business) and finally generates Blockcerts certificates with custom fields, with a custom display (displayHtml).

At Talao this was only a start months ago. Now we are full steam working on our upcoming product which is an hybrid decentralized/centralized suite. This suite - internal code name Bird, I personally call it Hybrid Bird - integrates : Ethereum blockchain smart contracts, centralized Node.js + MySQL back-end and 2 React front-ends. The features of the simple React app to generate certificates is getting integrated and evolving into a part of the Talao suite as a workflow of certificates creation between Talao Talents and Talao Clients.

Obviously, we do not plan to release our whole code which a crucial part of Talao’s business. Obviously too, we do not have any direct interest in re-factorizing our simple Blockcerts generator app, since we are totally integrating and improving it in our suite.

But if someone with credible intentions and dev resources steps up to have a look at our code with the intention to factorize it towards Blockcerts standard success, then we would be happy to help, given a reasonable amount of dev time investment for us, to turn this into an opensource project.

Yup, this code can be opened, and could be right now, but it would make sense only if someone serious steps up. We cannot allocate time for casual requests, please understand it. Anyways, this famous app we developed is only really basic forms and JSON generation, which any dev can code easily.

Certificates signing with Metamask

At the moment our business priorities can not allocate resources to develop this, but we are very confident that the whole Blockcerts blockchain certification can be developed in a few days in Javascript and handled through the Issuer’s Metamask account. Let us known if you’re interested in taking a lead on this.

Just to let you know: as for now at least, we developed our own Ethereum implementation of certification, in order to implement a more complex on-chain workflow. We’ll for sure follow Blockcerts and if we can, support development of a generic Ethereum protocol.